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Sexual Angst and Psychosis: The Internal Worlds of 'Repulsion'
Repu/s;on - from what? Sex, or rather sexuality. By primarily focusing on Carol's
encroaching madness, everyone and everything in Roman Polanski's Repulsion is
expressed in sexual terms. Carol's solace: an asexual life in a beauty salon, "amongst
women only". A modern day order - an irony heightened by the fact that Carol's flat
overlooks a convent. Escaping from sex, a modern day devil. Sex and madness -
Repulsion is a real modern day "possession" film. In the pub, Colin, Carol's unrequited
lover, endures sexual banter about "lesbians", whilst the "advice" handed down in the
beauty salon by manicurists fetishizing hands and feet is always along the lines of saving
clients from being sexual objects for men. Carol's hallucinations manifest through
baroque, expressionistic imagery: cracked walls, fairground style distorted facial
reflections and lascivious corridors in an apartment with elastic architecture.

Carol's solace from "disgusting" men is the flat which she shares with her
sister, Helen. But her defences aren't impervious and the first "intruder" is John, a married
man with whom Helen is having an affair. Carol is fascinated, both attracted and repulsed
by John's bathroom toiletries, most notably a straight razor. Contact with the outside world
is kept to a bare minimum, a telephone and reluctant visits to the door to stare through a
distorted peephole glass. When Colin breaks down the door in attempt to "get through" to
Carol, he`s bludgeoned on the head with a candlestick. A makeshift barricade constructed
out of a bookshelf is no good when a sleazy landlord unlocks the door looking to pick up
rent. He gets it in the back of the neck with the razor. Does Carol choose to incarcerate
herself, or is she forced too? Any "prison" drama ''concentrates" action in or around a
singular location. It is a narrative device Polanski has honed for over forty years,
culminating in Rosemary's Baby (1968) and The Tenant (1975). The piano scales which
we hear being played in an adjacent flat also pre-empt a scene in Polanski's most recent
drama, The Pianist (2002).
 Workmates indefinitely refer to Carol's withdrawal as "day dreaming". It's a
meditative state nonetheless, never more pronounced as when Carol walks across the
Hammersmith Bridge or through the streets of South Kensington oblivjous to buskers,
leering workmen, even a road accident. These scenes, later accompanied by the sound of
a frenetic "machine gun" drum role by Chico Hamilton, serve to punctuate Polanski's
drama into chapters. Shot in fluid uninterrupted tracking shots, Carol's "sleepwalking" is
both visually interesting: London life sweeps past her as if she's riding in a car or train
carriage; and relaxing: we know she's not going to engage or be interrupted by "other
people". Intrusion into Carol's psychic space is both violent (doors continually being
forced open by unwelcome male visitors) and noisy (doorbells, lift buttons and ringing
telephones).

Though white walls, bright lights and cleanliness, maybe formal opposites to
the trappings of traditional "gothic" spaces, it is bathrooms, operating theatres (even
beauty salons) that are the spaces of today's horrors - not least Norman Bates' shower
attack in Psycho (1960) or the bathtub "resurrection" in Henri-Georges Clouzot's Les
Diaboliques (1955). Carol washes her feet in the sink, scrubs her teeth to rid any trace of
Colin (or rather men). The bathroom is also home to John's toothbrush, not to mention his
razor. We also can't help but associate plug holes with the quasi-surrealist image conjured
up by an anecdote Helen relates to Carol about the Minister of Health finding eels coming
out of his sink!

"I must get this crack mended''.

"What?" - Helen's reply to Carol - our first indication of the inner and outer
world being cleaved apart, a hint that the walls of "reality" will soon be brought down. Not
just the walls, but the topology of Carol's flat becomes Polanski's underpinning metaphor.
But there's no pleasing some critics: many feel that it is Polanski's visualisation of the
early stages of Carol's mental collapse that are most effective whilst in the latter scenes -
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 whole walls fracturing, molesting hands
plunging out of corridor walls, fluid spatial
relations between places and objects - is
just too much. Film should either mimic
"reality" (whatever that is) or have such
moments of "artificially" (or theatricality)
quoted in inverted commas, for there is
no place for metaphor in film. Or is there?
When critics write of metaphors in film,
they often mean similes. One thing may
be merely "likened" to another, but
metaphors involve things being
"embodied" in another. In Repulsion, it's

not "like" Carol's world is falling apart. "it"

literally is. And when Brigitte cries "/ coo/d
cut my fhroaf.I" to verbalise a tortured
emotional mind state. . .

Not just Carol, but anyone

appearing a bit "mad" in Repulsion, is
told to "see a doctor", be in a "mad
home" or get his or her "head exam/'ned".
Quite what "mad" is is one thing, and "/.I
a// be/.ng /.n the head" is something el§e
again - themes Polanski would return to
in Rosemary's Baby and The Tenant.
Carol isn't really a psychopath, she just
wants to be left alone, sexually. The problem is, those around her - the infatuated Colin,
the lascMous landlord -just won't leave her be, And, drastic times call the drastic
measures, if murder is the only option to deal with her unwanted guests, so be it.
Nonetheless, to have nothing to do with men marks her out as at least "crazy", maybe a
little "soft in the head". By the end of Repulsion Carol is persecuted by those wishing to
"help" her, withdrawing completely into a catatonic state under the bed.

Repulsion is an "erotic" film in terms of it's play with senses, sight in

particular. The credits (by Maurice Binder) roll over a close-up of an eyeball, before the
director's name rolls horizontally, right to left, cutting the pupil in two. The camera then
tracks out revealing Carol at work. Cinematic associations proliferate: the track out of
Marion's glazed eye after the infamous shower murder in Hitchcock's Psycho (1960), Carl
Boehm's flickering eye in the first shot of Michael Powell's Peeping Tom (1960) (not to
mention the Powell and Pressburger "Archers" logo), and the infamous eyeball slicing
sequence in Bunuel and Dali's Un chien Andalou (1929). The latter hints at the abuse of
a barber's razor which lies ahead in Repulsion, the former of a disturbed, mental
landscape purposely cut-off from passers-by in the "real" world.

Someone speaking an absurd, incomprehensible word-salad signifies their

dropping out of the public world and into themselves, but how to represent a mental
break-down in purely visual terms? Polanski expresses Carol's distorted picture of the
world using optical illusions. First, her face appears distorted in a kettle, the fisheye lens
of the peephole in her door squashes the faces of visitors. The single most shocking
moment in Repulsion occurs when Carol opens a wardrobe door. A mirror suddenly
reflects a man standing inside the flat. It's a reflection, and the man in the mirror isn't
"really there" - the perfect metaphor for Carol's demons. As the film reaches a climax,
Polanski interferes with our sense of perspective by increasing the spaces of the flat
whilst keeping the objects inside relatively positioned. Before Carol's "crimes" are
discovered, Polanski tracks and zooms slightly into the ceiling, suggesting Carol's
''suffocation".

Repulsion could be construed alongside Andrzej Zulawski's Possession

(1981 ) (the former dealing with the loved, the latter with the lover) as murderous
existential conundrums in which anguished young women struggle with both freedom and
their beautiful bodies (one virginal. the other not so) against the imposing wills of adoring
lovers. It is an ''erotic" film in terms of it`s play with senses. Film being a primarily visual
medium, we tend to neglect not only what we don't see (Helen's orgasmic moans, static
interior shots framed to have us rolling our heads in an attempt to "see" around doorways
as Carol moves about the next room) but also what we hear. Bar the man in the wardrobe
mirror, the most startling moments in Repulsion are always auditory - bangs on the door.
the ringing telephone etc. Usually, in the "sane" world such sounds are sublimated into
background noise, our attention singling out conversation, for example. However, in
Repulsion such sound effects progressively take centre stage (besides, Carol doesn't
have anyone to have a conversation with) -a dripping bath tap. Also, the absence of
sounds - arguably the most nightmarish moments in Repulsion occurs when Carol is
being raped by her "imaginary" friends and we don't hear her screams, only the ticking of
a Bergman-esque clock.
Repulsion is covertly erotic in terms of Carol's attempt to expel sexuality, most of all her
own, from the world. She may hold herself like a little girl, but she's betrayed by her own
body. To men, she stinks of unsatisfied desire. Poor Colin, Carol's first victim. ms mates
down the pub soon catoh on, 'Thaf a/d /ad's /.n /owe./''. Pub philosophy paints a rather bleak
picture of the human condition - "b/oody v/+g/.ns" being just a bunch of prick teasers,
Carol for one "gels a b/.g fhr/.// out of /T'. Back in the salon, Brigitte sobs about ''B/oody
men. They prom/.se you the wor/d, and. . ." Later, a customer tells her that "!here's on/y
one thing [men] want. ..the more you make them beg for it, the happier they are." The
landlord fits that bill, but Colin doesn't. Carol can't accommodate his feelings for her and
recoils from being possessed. Besides, they says love is a kind of madness too.

Daniel Bird
CHAPTER SELECTIONS

1 Opening Titles

2 First Date
3 The Younger sister
4 Morning After

5 Imperfections
6 Repulsing Dirt

7 Danish pastry
8 Alone

9 Catatonic Fear
10 Cracking World

11 Love Virgin

12 Killed Pain

13 Haunted Memories

14 Damaged Properties
15 Your Friend

16 Closing Up

17 Deliverance

18 End Credits

DVD special features produced by Carl Daft and David Gregory.

Special thanks tl Roman Polanski, Gene Gutowski, lsabelle Dassonville, Seamus Flannery and John Henderson.
Booklet layout and design by David Flint -www.divineproductions.co.uk
www.anchorbay.co.uk